[aestetix_]

I think Google is attempting to be brilliant, but I think it will cause them lots of problems in the longrun. Right now, a lot of people who want to visit pepsi.com just go to Google, type in "pepsi", and assume pepsi.com will be the first result. Google seems to want to sidestep this and allow people to search for +Pepsi, which will take them straight to the product page for Pepsi.

So what happens when you have two companies that have the same name? A classic example of this is the problem that rose with Nissan.com. It was registered by a guy who's last name was Nissan, to promote his family's computer business, Nissan computers. Then the car company tried to sue them to kingdom come.

Bring this dynamic into Google Plus. You have two companies called Nissan, and they both want product pages. Do you let them both be "+Nissan", do you force them to be "+Nissan Cars" and "+Nissan Computers", or do you let one be "+Nissan" and one be "+Nissan Computers", based on trending and search results? Or do you let one pay you lots of money to be ranked above the other?

If this sounds familiar, it's because it's both a recreation of the phone book, as well as Yahoo before they turned portal. I sense Google will get away with paid ranking because "it's their product" and they don't have to deal with net neutrality issues.

My trust in Google just tanked even more.

[pinwale]

Talk of paid rankings are premature and mentioning net neutrality is a red herring. Net neutrality has nothing to do with the impartiality of Google Search.

It also appears that the +[keyword] redirect in Google Search only happens with verified pages. I assume +[keywords]/Google+ Pages are going to be first-come-first-serve like twitter/facebook/etc with exceptions for trademarks.

Edit: It seems that the +[keywords] redirect is determined algorithmically.

> A page’s eligibility for Google+ Direct Connect is determined algorithmically, based on certain signals we use to help understand your page's relevancy and popularity. In addition to this analysis, we look for a link between your Google+ page and your website. To help Google associate this content, be sure to connect your Google+ page and your website using the Google+ badge, or by adding a snippet of code to your site, in addition to adding your website link to your page.